David Brooks’ attempts to blame the base of the Republican Party for potential loss of the upcoming election reminds one of the Democratic Leadership Conference’s attempts to blame the Democrats’ base for its election losses back in the 80s and 90s.

It would be ridiculous for a political party to tell certain voting blocs, “Quit voting for us!” If the Republican base were to somehow magically disappear, Brooks and his cosmo friends would find the party shrunken to a very small group of individuals no bigger than the Libertarians. The DLC’s problem was that it basically was a grouping of politicos, lobbyists, politicians, and other Beltway types who had absolutely no troops of their own to turn whatever policy prescriptions they had into power.  This fallacy was exposed in 1988 and 1994. Bill Clinton was successful because he could unite the Democrat base behind him while he tried out DLC proposals. However, such an approach contributed to decimating the party in many parts of the country while he was president.

Likewise, the neocons would find themselves one lonely group if all they had were themselves and their think tanks and foundations to support GOP candidates. The reason Bill Kristol and few others pumped up Sarah Palin’s VP prospects was the fact that a more raw neocon like Joe Liberman was not acceptable to the base but Palin was. And because Palin was a blank slate on some foreign-policy issues and echoed neocon views on others, she could be molded into the perfect candidate to both unite the base and what passes for the intellectual wing in the GOP these days.

The Republicans cannot shed downscale, MAR, Scots-Irish, religious voters any more than the Dems could shed Blacks, or Hispanics, or teachers. Otherwise the GOP would lose states like Tennessee and Oklahoma.  The trick is to keep the base, get it to turn out, and then expand upon it. Right now, outside of what Ron Paul is offering, there really aren’t any ideas or policy proposals out there that can do that. The neocons and other GOP intellectuals throughout this decade thought they could take chunks of voters from the Dems with ideas like school vouchers, undying support for Israel, faith-based initiatives, and immigration reform. Such ideas have been discredited, especially in some cases by the base itself.  If Brooks and his buddies have a problem with this, they are more than free to turn their allegiances over Obama and the Dems if they wish to find a more comfortable home (assuming Obama follows through on an interventionist foreign policy).

Larison also skewers such thinking on Eunomia today.